Social Widget

Are we moving into a “post-American” world? Oxford prof and Hoover fellow Timothy Garton Ash writes in the L.A. Times, “Maybe after some years spent putting its own house in order, it will come back as — for all its many faults and hypocrisies — the indispensable anchor of some kind of liberal international order. But given not just its structural domestic problems but above all the changing global power constellation around it, I somehow doubt it.” Roger Cohen in the New York Times writes, “Obama has deferred to a growing isolationism. His wavering has looked like acquiescence to a global power shift.”

Meanwhile, Reuters has a good interview with CJCS Gen. Dempsey on why he’s not eager for war in Syria.

Can’t help pairing that with a guest post at Tom Ricks’ Best Defense blog by Capt. Jesse Sloman, who suggests that retired general Robert Scales’ Washington Post op-ed was out of line. (It said, among other things, that currently serving generals are “embarrassed to be associated with the amateurism of the Obama administration’s attempts to craft a plan that makes strategic sense.”) See also Robert Killebrew’s “Rank partisanship” (AFJ, June 2013).

Warlord’s Quote of the Day

“What is ‘right,’ as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power; the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.” — Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

Contributed by Michael Clauser, who supports U.S. Africa Command’s counterterrorism programs. From a list compiled by the Warlord Loop, a private email forum for national security experts.